Thursday, 9 May 2013

internet job scams ruined my evening

I don't really understand how this
works, maybe one of you out there could enlighten me on the strange wide
world of online job searches. This one sounded perfect. It would only
be 20-30 hours maximum a week, real-time meaning-for-meaning
transcription of college courses for deaf/otherwise hard of hearing
people.The
hours would be awesome for filling up the winter months in the slow
tourist season, and I'd get to hang out learning stuff for free all day
long.

Right? Awesome.

I
usually assume transcription jobs are fake when I find them online
because you always need to have taken a course ... online ... on a
sketchy as hell website. And it's always like seven hundred bucks.
And then the work isn't even guaranteed
afterward. And all the online reviews are fake too.

But
this. It was actually a job posting on a real website of a real college.
They said they'd pay for candidates to take the course and at the end
there's (probably?) jobs at the college. I emailed the contact people that were listed in the job posting asking
what I'd have to do to get this too-good-to-be-true job and one woman
responded with an email that linked me to a website.

Okay.
It looks like every other scammy transcription school website I've seen. But real people in a real college sent me there. I
think???

Anyway so I went through the motions of creating an account and
verifying it with my email addresss and I read the first few pages of instructions. Which were kind of ... off.

They are
supposedly looking for well-educated people (because you'd need to have
at least some computer knowledge, understand some or most of the course
material you are transcribing, as well as understand grammar and be able
to concentrate well in distracting scenarios), yet the site was totally written
for dummies. I
mean, it explained that you should read all the directions (duh), what links
in a sidebar do (double duh), and it said things like "The typing test is what you will
be doing next. This test is really hard. You may have taken an online
typing test before but this one will be even more difficult." bla bla
bla that's not an actual quote but you get the picture.

So...after
reading this I was feeling pretty suspicious. But I read everything.
Including the one small sentence buried in a mountain of text stating
that "graduates" of this course would of course not have to pay their
own tuition if they had a sponsor but they would have to buy some type
of software and provide their own computers.

Hm. What software? And more importantly, how much does it cost?

I clicked around a bit.

Yeah. Three hundred bucks.

The one rule I know about internet scams is never give anybody any money so this is a huge flashing red light to me. SCAM SCAM SCAM

But then I was already all set-up and
pumped to do a typing test, and that part is free, so I thought "what the heck" and clicked through
to the test. The site crashed and said I needed to download a specific Java
update to continue. When I tried to enable that
specific Java dealy my computer warned me that it was known to cause problems
with security and is "unstable".

Well that was the final straw. I closed the entire site, and emailed the woman who told me she'd be my
sponsor and who had linked to the site. I asked, first of all, if the
college would be buying the $300 software after I graduated and secondly whether
or not they'd heard of other people having security issues with that
version of Java. I asked politely but as I was typing it I was thinking "I'm on to you".

Anyway
I don't expect to hear back. Oh, also, as I was writing that email I noticed her phone number in the
letterhead is a Vancouver number. Why would a
college in Victoria (not a sister of any larger university) be hiring
from anywhere in Vancouver?

Anyway
the entire thing reeks of a scam or at least it feels somehow wrong, and I'm very disappointed because I
went so far as to fantasize about a job in a college, doing transcription work, attending interesting classes and all that jazz. Bla bla bla whatever.